ABSTRACT
There is a famous passage in the notebooks to A Raw Youth where Dostoevsky
rails against his critics and defends the rationale for his works and his method,
proclaiming that his glory is in depicting the Underground, the true life of the
Russian majority. In this passage he also gives the impression that there is a
connection between his motives and the underlying concerns of Slavophilism; he
picks out the aspects of Russian life that preoccupy him most, and relates them to
his position in the ideological spectrum of the intelligentsia. The text, although
familiar, is worth revisiting in the context of the arguments of this study:
Facts. They pass by. They don’t notice. There aren’t any citizens, and
nobody wants to exert themselves or make themselves think or take notice. I
haven’t been able to tear myself away, and all the shouts of the critics that I
don’t depict real life haven’t dissuaded me. There are no foundations to our
society, no rules have been worked out, because there hasn’t been any life
either. One colossal shock – and it all ceases, falls, and is negated, as if it
had never existed at all. And not only externally, as in the West, but
internally, morally. [. . .] It was out of this (civic) feeling that I nearly went
over to the Slavophiles, thinking that I could resurrect the dreams of my
childhood (I read Karamzin; the images of Sergius and Tikhon). [. . .] As
heroes, those beginning with Silvio and the Hero of Our Time up to Prince
Bolkonsky and Levin are merely representative of petty egoism [. . .]. The
reason for the underground is the annihilation of belief in common rules.
